Odyssey Festival Orchestra: Ossian’s Shadow

The spirit of the fake Gaelic poet Ossian inspired a generation of European romantics with the idea of Scotland as a land filled with wild crags, magical caves, ancient castles, melancholy warriors, and neurotic heroines.

By the 1830s, his spiritual successor, Sir Walter Scott, had also become a best-selling writer whose poems and novels, often in translation, cemented that impression in the popular imagination.

This concert looks at how European composers responded to the glamour and exoticism of the idea of Scotland: from the German Felix Mendelssohn to the Frenchman Hector Berlioz and the Italian opera composers Rossini and Donizetti, including the famous mad scene from the latter’s Lucia di Lammermoor.

London’s bold new orchestra, the Odyssey Festival Orchestra, is made up of young pre-professional musicians aged between 18 and 30 and continues to explore the philosophical and cultural context behind classical music’s great masterpieces.